New Domain Earns Nearly 700k Monthly Visitors in 18 Months with Fractl


In late 2017, addiction information specialists Recovery Brands asked Fractl to help migrate an older, underperforming domain—Alcoholic.org—to a new domain—Alcohol.org—and position the rebranded domain as an authoritative resource devoted to educating the public about alcohol abuse and rehabilitation. Our strategy focused on producing best-in-class content at a massive scale and creating a truly authoritative brand, ultimately leading to Alcohol.org becoming one of the top performing sites pertaining to alcohol abuse and treatment on the web.


RESULTS

Analytics

168

mentions from 56 major publishers + websites including:


177

radio mentions from 100 unique domains from 34 states


173

regional media mentions from
121 unique domains from 39 states + D.C.

Engagement Highlights

Fractl used content marketing, digital PR, and resource link building to drive relevant and authoritative links to this brand new domain and grew its traffic by nearly 700,000 visitors per month.

By analyzing advanced data resources such as the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, and data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), we were able to create unique, newsworthy content campaigns.

Fractl’s organic growth strategies led to a dramatic spike in site traffic from just ~600 visitors per month to 700,000 per month over the course of 18 months, adding close to 600 Unique Linking Domains (ULDs) to their link portfolio.

Throughout the engagement, Fractl produced many large-scale content marketing campaigns based on tangentially-related newsworthy topics such as “celebration drinking habits” and “service industry professional confessions.” This type of content is ideal for earning high-authority press coverage and links.

High-quality content that was designed to attract top-tier publishers resulted in a campaign average of about 380 press mentions and 65 dofollow backlinks per campaign.

Campaign coverage was picked up by 34 unique Yahoo subdomains with international coverage in 9 countries, showing our ability to syndicate through a large publisher’s extensive network.

Fractl’s in-house conversion team succeeded in converting 22 organic mentions into links, resulting in 17 additional dofollow links and 4 nofollow links across 7 campaigns.

SEO Strategy

The original site, Alcoholic.org, had significant site health problems and had flatlined at 6k visitors/month for years, despite continued content and link building efforts. Aggressive, holistic measures were planned to overhaul the site and put it on a path toward rapid growth.

The first step was to produce a wealth of content about everything related to alcohol abuse, adding hundreds of best-in-class articles to position the site to benefit dramatically from content marketing, link building, and long-term link attraction. In addition, dozens of pages were rewritten over the course of the rebrand, migration, and relaunch.

Over a short period of time, successful link and authority building led to top rankings for high-volume “top funnel” informational topics and helped to attract hundreds of quality links. In conjunction with the content marketing campaigns, this accumulation of links dramatically accelerated the process of obtaining top rankings for many of the highest value keywords in this competitive space.

One of the best long-term, “future-proofed” SEO strategies is to become a true authority in your respective space for ALL related topics, not just your “money keywords.” Content for a topic like “Am I an Alcoholic?” can be just as strategically valuable as well as obvious, directly converting topics like “Alcohol Rehab Centers,” with both providing opportunities for natural authority building and “longtail” keywords.

Factual, comprehensive, and fully soured/cited content was developed to meet the high standards for health-related “Your Money Or Your Life” (YMYL) search queries, for which Google stipulates substantially higher standard for quality. This content aims primarily to satisfy user queries and includes rich media with the intention of adding value instead of thin, overly commercial “fluff.”

Because Alcoholic.org had a long and checkered history, improvements to the link profile needed to be made. Old links that could be considered unnatural or spammy were disavowed. The lowest performing pages were not migrated from Alcoholic.org, preventing any and all “weak links” from transferring to the new domain during the migration.

Significant “E-A-T” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) improvements were made by adding information on staff and contributor credentials and a comprehensive “About” page with a clearly stated mission and details about the company.

Vertical Insights

Our campaigns leveraged viral emotional surprise with studies that revealed the need to analyze this substance, featuring statistics that support claims such as, “Alcohol still kills more people than any other drug.”

When working in sensitive verticals such as health, our team has learned the importance of utilizing authoritative sources for our content. Fortunately, our team’s fluency with government datasets such as FARS/UCR/SAMHSA allowed us to tap into a plethora of real-world examples of our nation’s unhealthy relationship with alcohol consumption.

In the final stages of our content marketing campaigns, we went a step further and solicited quotes from chief medical officers and medical directors from around the nation to substantiate and comment on our findings. We took complex studies and transformed them into approachable graphics and newsworthy hooks that top-tier health writers loved to cover.

Our ability to blend Fractl’s methods for success with the authority and insight from the client set us up to find value outside of just generating press mentions or content production. We were able to take the expertise and benefits from many different departments and brands in order to customize an engagement that provided the unique success our client needed.

Meg Piedmont
Account Manager, Fractl

Lasting organic growth requires a forward-thinking strategy. By helping Recovery Brands invest in all 3 pillars of SEO (technical SEO, content production, and link acquisition) over the long term, we helped them develop an asset which will drive business for them for years to come.

Tom Dehnel
Business Relationship Manager, Fractl

It's such a delight to work for a client who sees the value of what we do and allows us to flex our data analysis capabilities and campaign styles to produce compelling stories for audiences. This trust has allowed us to traverse many verticals and capture the broad, emotional implications of alcoholism in a way where audiences take notice.

Melody Kasulis
Creative Production, Fractl